atheros and mad wifi

[rcblach]

I cant seem to get the my Atheros pci wireless card working off of the knoppix cd

the system does NOT seem to bring up the ath0 device driver and just has the eth1 device.

when I try to set the wap key, the system hangs

here is the lspci from a woriking system
02:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Subsystem: Netgear: Unknown device 5a00
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 168 (2500ns min, 7000ns max), Cache Line Size 04
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 9
Region 0: Memory at fead0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1- D2- AuxCurrent=375mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=2 PME-
Has anybody had any sucess getting this card to work under Knoppix

Thanks

chip

[PaulBx1]

Is that a Netgear WG511T? I've been working with one of those, gets something similar using lspci. Mine shows up as eth0 also, which is actually an advantage because you don't have to edit some file to add ath0 support (can't remember the name of the file, it's just something you don't have to worry about). In case you haven't figured it out I'm a noob on this stuff.

Here is my thread:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23996

I actually got farther than this. Got to where I could visit one or two websites, then it would stop working. I haven't pursued it lately.

Apparently Knoppix 4.0.2 has madwifi so that is what I used.

I found a few websites that may be helpful:
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Wireless_Networking

(I use the WG111 as a sort-of example, except that I use madwifi rather than ndiswrapper, and in my case the "route add" command does not seem to be necessary. I also use "ifconfig eth0 down" to make sure it is off before invoking wpa_supplicant. (You can do "ifconfig eth0 up" prior to this and then "iwlist eth0 scan" to make sure you communicate with the access point.)

At the bottom of that page you have a link to here:
http://hostap.epitest.fi/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/hostap/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain
which gives you a good basic wpa_supplicant.conf file to start from.

I did not turn encryption off like some folks around here advise (while getting started) because I can't get into maintenance mode on my access point.
I'm still not finished so I can't give you much more detailed help, but here is roughly the steps that I've done to sort-of get it working:

1) Build a good wpa_supplicant.conf file using that example and the encryption and other data you should have on hand.
2) Store it in /home/knoppix
3) sudo wpa_supplicant -ddKt -i eth0 -c /home/knoppix/wpa_supplicant.conf -D madwifi
4) sudo pump -i eth0
5) ifconfig (to see if it is grabbing an IP address)

and start using the browser. Of course you will be using eth1, not eth0.

Other links for you:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19784&highlight=dhclient
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20915&highlight=wpa
http://madwifi.org/
http://hardware.newsforge.com/hardware/04/05/28/1738226.shtml?tid=65&tid=81

Seems like with this later Knoppix, some of those steps are no longer needed. My impression anyway. Good luck! Let us know what you did if you get it working.

<later> Now that I try it again, it seems to work just fine. I still don't know how to shut the thing down gracefully. I did get smarter and put the wpa_supplicant.conf on sda1 so I don't have to rebuild it every time. :roll: I guess I will make a little script somewhere...